Online identities will be growing rapidly in importance and will raise a plethora of issues. They are sometimes formalizations of social identities but are fundamentally more rigid. This (and the large number of online services) leads to people using multiple identities. Linking multiple identities to a legal identity and across time and domains can cause problems, in the form of breaches of privacy, risks of identity theft, damage to reputations, and reprisals. Gathering identities into identity metasystems can solve some of these problems but at the expense of posing new challenges such as border-crossing identity systems of unclear jurisdiction, massive data breaches, and expanding the power of identity providers over the identified and their social interactions. Virtual worlds – be they online games, social spaces or teleconferencing, will grow in reach and use. Users feel strongly about their online identities and want control over them despite weak legal protections. Successful social spaces allow negotiation between users and the maintainers. As online identities become more important it is likely that formal legal protection for them will be needed, yet it will be hard to implement effective enforcement and avoiding strangling social and entrepreneurial creativity. The augmented world and exoselves: In the words of one author, the generation growing up now will “never be alone, never lost, never forget” – the constant connectivity holds together social networks regardless of location, location services makes everything findable, and life recording allows the storage of representations of a large part of life. The resulting extended memory is likely to have significant effects on personal identity: parts of identity will reside in a persistent “exoself” of information and software. Life recording will also likely to synergize with social networking into seamless “life sharing”. The limits of privacy will be pushed as a generation grows up with this technology. Even if the average person in 2025 is not using full lifelogging, many of the functions being explored today will likely exist in the background of their technology. Identity technology: Not only humans but objects are gaining persistent, traceable identities. RFID-tags and other methods will give many objects a much richer identity, allowing them to be identified not just as belonging to a category but also as individual objects, possibly without direct touch. Similarly, biometric identification and data fusion – the combination of evidence from several “senses” – will make automatic remote identification of people easier (especially since they might carry a recognizable constellation of RFID tags and a smartphone). Thanks to rich databases and new probabilistic algorithms, identity resolution (constructing a persistent identity from various records) is increasingly feasible. Such systems can allow wide-ranging transparency and accountability, but also threaten privacy and secrecy. Finding the proper regulation and social norms for a nearly totally identifiable society will be a major process over the next 15 years. Automation and robotics will have broad but diffuse impacts on various aspects of identity, mainly by gradually changing the nature of work and impacting labour markets. These effects will represent a continuation of long-term trends that have led to urbanization and to a remarkable growth of the service sectors of advanced economies. Both IT skills and people skills will be in demand on the labour market. Careers will become 5 more fluid, and it will be important for the country to have a work force that is adaptable and that can master new skills as need arises. A major breakthrough in artificial general intelligence could have extremely profound implications for society and for many aspects of identity; however, this must be regarded as a unlikely possibility within the given 15 year timeframe. Medicine and personalized health are not only about health but also about the expression of social identities. This function will become increasingly prominent as preventive, diagnostic, and enhancement medicine grow in importance. Eating healthy and exercising – or not – are choices that people make not only because of health effects but also to maintain a certain social identity. Diagnostic medicine (and genomics) will expand the medicalization of self-conception. Enhancement medicine, too, is focused very much on social identity and self-expression rather than merely on health and biological capacity narrowly construed. It is paramount to consider these identity-related dimensions of medicine if we are to understand how and why people will be consuming health care resources in the future. Life extension may lead to new forms of age identities, where people no longer identify with traditional age groups. Genomics raises many important identity-related issues; in fact, an entire report could be written on these issues alone. Some of the main issues include: (1) changes in self-conception as a result of knowledge about the personal genome and how it correlates with life outcomes; (2) general changes in conceptions of human nature and human identity as a result of better understanding genetic causation (advances in neuroscience also act in the same direction); (3) the possibility that genomics will reveal significant differences between ethnic groups (or differences that some will interpret to be significant) - this could have important implications for ethnic identity; (4) genetic privacy will become increasingly hard to safeguard, thanks to cheaper gene sequencing and methods such as PCR amplification that allow even a small sample (such as a skin flake or a hair follicle) to produce enough genetic information. This latter implication is especially worth highlighting. The medicalization of conception, embryo selection, and (over time) genetic modification will have important effects on individuals - most obviously on individuals who would not have come into existence were it not for these procedures, but also on parents whose reproductive lifespan is extended, and eventually on wider society. The more radical possibilities of genetic modification are unlikely to come into significant use within a 15-year timeframe; however, they may become extremely important over the longer term. Drug-use will continue to be a significant identity-related issue, and it may be joined by new concerns over novel pharmaceutical neuroagents. There are speculations that e.g. neuropeptides could be developed that could be distributed as aerosol and used for neurological manipulation. Invasive brain-computer interfaces are unlikely to have widespread impacts on identity within a 15-year horizon. Non-invasive interfaces, such as various brain-scanning techniques, could have important effects if reliable and practicable techniques for detecting deception were to be developed (though this appears somewhat unlikely within the given timeframe). In addition, brain scanning technologies might have effects on public perception through fears about loss of neural privacy and as a result of mistaken “neurohype”. A long lived, multigenerational society: Longer lifespans will lead to changes in how people regard their identity as aged people, as well as increased diversity in how age-related aspects of identity are managed and in cultural expectations. Intergenerational conflicts can erupt if institutions and social norms do not adapt to a generationally, culturally and technologically diverse society. New technologies may accentuate the vulnerability of certain groups: people who are outside identity systems, people who need certain forms of privacy, people unable to handle the growing complexity of identity, people who are victims of identity theft, and people with persistently ruined reputations. Developing methods for identity rehabilitation might be important in order to reduce the risk for vulnerable groups. 6 7 1. Introduction This paper reviews some of the possible impacts on identity from three broad fields of technological advancement: biotechnology; automation and robotics; and information and communications technologies. We consider a time horizon of 15 years, with the occasional glance towards development further down the road. For each of the three areas covered, we briefly review and evaluate technological advances that might plausibly be expected within the 15 year time frame. We then seek to illuminate the potential impacts that these development might have on social identity, and we identify and highlight developments that are of particular relevance for governmental policy and that present novel risks or opportunities for policymakers. Personal identity being an extremely multifaceted concept, we will not attempt here to furnish an exact definition. We will use the term “identity” to cover a number of loosely related notions, including the selfimages and reputational capital of individuals, social and formal identifications, perceptions and prejudices related to social group membership, software representations of identity, and more broadly changing views of human nature. We will accept a degree of indeterminacy in the concept of identity itself, and put the focus on presenting what seems to us the most interesting and policy-relevant insights in the general neighbourhood of the concept of social identity. The concepts of identity Identity has many meanings in different domains, and in this report the following are relevant: Much analysis of identity has been done in philosophy, in particular focusing on identity as persistence of something, as being definable, recognizable and in particular the issues surrounding personal identity. The philosophy of personal identity is a large field, but some of the key questions include whether there is a persistent identity over time, how important personal continuity is, the relation between numerical identity (being the same person) and qualitative identity (being similar to a past or future self), the links between our minds and bodies, and whether there even exists a self. In psychology personal identity is linked to our experience of being someone (a “core self”) and our sense of being a particular person with a past, future and various attributes (a “narrative self”). The narrative identity is gradually built up over the lifespan and plays an important role both in living a meaningful life and fitting into a social context. Both kinds of selves can be impaired or modified in different ways: meditation, certain drugs and the Cotard delusion2 can change the sense of core self, while amnesia and false memories can transform the narrative self. Deliberate modification of the self, using internal and external means is an important part of human life and adapts new technologies rapidly3 . In fact, it may often be a driver for new technologies – cosmetics, plastic surgery, social media etc. Psychological identity shades over into social identity. Social identity involves aspects such as the different personas (social roles) people take on in different contexts, how people identify with group identities (as well as sexual, gender, and cultural identities) and how these are used in various forms of expression and affiliation. People maintain a rich structure of social identities, often keeping them separate. Each of these identities has attributes, roles and norms within their social contexts4 . 2 A rare neuropsychiatric disorder where the victim believes that they are dead or do not exist. 3 Robert J. Weber, The Created Self, W.W. Norton & Company, 2001. 4 Helen Nissenbaum, Privacy in Context: Technology, Policy, and the Integrity of Social Life. Stanford University Press, 2009, p. 132 A particular formal rules in more than Another imp person is of fully guaran biometric p twins sharin authenticatio their freedom information Digital iden a computer that the user the online n Digital ident aspect of dig claim to be identities, a identifier. authenticatio 5 Different fa something you that for a posit J.B. 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As society becomes more reliant on digital processing the distinction between social and digital identities might also diminish. A key issue is whether this allows the digital identities to become as flexible as social identities, or whether there is a risk of social identities to become formal and rigid, forcing us to live in a way we might not desire. There is hence a strong public policy concern that technologies and policies that affect personal identity should allow people to maintain flexible social identities, even if it might be technologically and administratively easier to create systems that forces fixed identities.